Advance Fee Scam
A scammer requests an upfront payment, promising a future service or huge return on investment.
Affinity Scams
A scammer targets members of an identifiable group (e.g., cultural, political, religious, or ethnic community) and curries favor with them to rope them into a fraudulent investment opportunity.
Artificial Intelligence Scam
AI cryptocurrency scams and schemes leverage artificial intelligence to automate, personalize, and scale crypto-related theft. These scams often involve deepfake videos of celebrities promoting fake projects, AI-powered trading bots promising guaranteed high returns, and fake, AI-generated investment platforms.
Asset Recovery Scam
Scam by a third party requiring a fee to "recover" funds lost in a prior fraudulent transaction.
Bait and Switch Scams
Scam to mislead buyers, whereby a seller advertises an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a financial product or service that the seller does not actually intend to sell. Instead, the seller offers a sub-par, defective, or unwanted product or service. For crypto, this might be most relevant to non-fungible tokens.
Crypto Blackmail Scam
Scammers send emails or physical mail to victims claiming to have the victim’s personal information or embarrassing photos or videos of the victim. The scammer then threatens to make this information public unless the victim pays them in cryptocurrency.
Crypto Staking
The practice of locking crypto assets for a set time on a blockchain network in return for earning rewards. Scammers that offer staking as a service typically promise high staking returns to lure investors to a digital asset project or platform.
Fraud
Making a misrepresentation or using deception for unlawful purposes.
Fraudulent Trading Platform
Scammer develops a fraudulent website or application and convinces victims to deposit funds to the platform under the guise of providing victims access to a unique investment opportunity. The fraudulent platforms appear legitimate, even going as far as replicating price movements and producing artificial gains.
Hacking Scam
Exploiting a computer system or private network inside a computer with the intent of stealing personal information, such as passwords and bank account information, for financial gain.
High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP)
Ponzi schemes that promise passive income and high returns in short periods of time through an investment of crypto assets. These schemes often offer payment structures like that of multi-level marketing or pyramid schemes to recruit new investors, promising early investors a percentage of the profits of other investors they recruit. These schemes are usually heavily promoted through social media and may use paid social media promoters to market their product.
Identity Theft
Crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person's personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain (aka identity fraud).
Imposter Scams
A scammer impersonates a legitimate business, government agent, or well-known figure to gain access to a user's systems and personal information for financial gain (i.e. to steal the user's assets).
Liquidity Mining Scam
Liquidity mining is an investment strategy used to earn passive income with crypto assets. Investors stake their crypto assets in a liquidity pool to provide traders with the liquidity to conduct transactions. In exchange, investors receive a portion of the trading fees. In the liquidity mining scam, victims move cryptocurrency from their wallets to the liquidity mining platform and see the purported returns on a falsified dashboard (i.e., FBI Public Announcement). Believing their investments to be a success, victims purchase additional cryptocurrency. Scammers ultimately move all stored cryptocurrency and investments made to a scammer-controlled wallet.
Livestream Scam
A scammer broadcasts a livestream event through an online streaming platform (e.g., YouTube or Twitch) to market a fraudulent promotion or product. Promotions typically offer questionable terms that are too good to be true and may request payment through crypto assets.
Mirror Trading Scam
A strategy in which traders or investors mimic others by implementing the same trades that others do in the trader's own account. It can be done in both forex and stock markets but is more common in forex trading.
Pig Butchering or Financial Grooming Scams
Also known as a romance scam, the scammer may use a variety of methods to establish a relationship (either social, romantic, or business focus) and then gain the victim's confidence and gradually introduce the victim to a fraudulent investment opportunity. The scammer manipulates the victim into sending money, crypto or sensitive personal information to a fake online platform. However, the victim is never able to withdraw their funds from the site and may be asked to transfer even more funds before anything can be withdrawn through a variety of excuses (e.g., service fees, IRS taxes, etc.).
Rug Pull Scam (aka Pump and Dump)
Variation of investment scheme where a developer attracts investors to a new cryptocurrency project (i.e. a new token or initial coin offering) through online crowdfunding, pumps up the value of the investment, and then pulls out before the project is built, leaving investors with a worthless currency.
Spoofing Scam
A spoofing scam is a fraudulent tactic where criminals disguise their identity by faking caller ID, email addresses, or website URLs to appear as a trusted source, such as a bank, government agency, or known contact. The goal is to deceive victims into revealing personal information or sending money.
Task Scam
A “pay to get paid” scheme that starts with an unsolicited text, email or social media message offering high pay for simple tasks like rating videos, clicking buttons or entering data. The scammer makes the victim pay a small amount to access the earning potential and requires larger and larger deposits to “unlock” more tasks. Once the larger deposits are paid, the scammer disappears and the fake “earnings” evaporate.
Tech Support Scam
Tech support scammers want victims to believe they have a serious problem with their computer, like a virus. They want victims to pay for tech support services the victims don't need to fix a problem that doesn't exist. They often ask victims to pay by wiring money, putting money on a gift card, prepaid card or cash reload card, or using a money transfer app because they know those types of payments can be hard to reverse.
